Imagining Anthropology's History

1 It is yet another product of the Dutch school of critical anthropology that gets its inspiration from the late Bob Scholte and Johannes Fabian and the events of 1968.

2 In their discourse they speak only of “anthropology” and never say who and what they mean to include: every anthropologist, every country, and every era? Until today?

3 Pels leaves no doubt as to his intention to indict anthropology at every opportunity (cf. 1991, 1994, 1997). For example: “My main worry is [that the Yanomamo case will be taken], as Sponsel puts it, to be ‘the ugliest affair in the entire history of anthropology’. This erasure of all the other instances of anthropology's usually colonial and often ugly past can only be based on a myopic understanding of our discipline, one that seduces itself with a narrow, professionalistic self-understanding” (CitationPels, 2002, p. 151, emphasis in the original).

4 As one not so well acquainted with the works of Kant or Žižek, I wish Professor Dirks had included citations so that I could look up the original quotations in order to see what they actually said.

5 Hinsley continues, “blindness to historical agency on the part of metropolitan cultural representatives proved to be immensely costly to the colonized landscapes and peoples of the American Southwest” (p. 194). Could “Zuni Breadstuff,” Frank Cushing's lovingly detailed and poetic account of the processes by which the people of Zuni obtained their bread, from starting a field through the etiquette of eating, published in brief installments in Millstone, “an agricultural and milling trade journal,” really have had such a powerful, world-altering influence on these “colonized landscapes and peoples”? (For this and other pieces by Cushing, see CitationGreen, 1979.)

6 Gloria Emerson, Dine (Navajo) artist and educator, has noted the great importance of the work of Washington Matthews, another army man turned ethnographer, whose studies of Navajo painting, music, dance, ceremonies, and mythology are of particular importance now “that many modern Navajos do not have the wisdom of grandparents as primary sources anymore” (CitationEmerson, 1997, p. 129).

7 See Salemink's bibliography in his book (2003). He employs the collective ethnonym, “Montagnards,” although its use is currently in dispute, if not disrepute.

8 It is ironic that the author, who focuses his critical gaze on “cultural relativists” who favor the preservation of the “traditional cultures,” has himself been involved in such projects as the representative of the Ford Foundation in Hanoi. Apparently the same debates are still going on a century later, and our author adopts some of the same language of the “colonial” past, writing of “creating favourable occasions in everyday life to enable minority people, while participating in modern life, to live their traditional culture” (2001, p. 211). Nor is he as hard on Kinh anthropologists and the current Kinh-controlled government for holding similar attitudes to those of the French “evolutionists” of old, or on the “Montagnard” anthropologists who seem to have attitudes very much like his French “relativists.”

9 This is not “the first comprehensive history of American anthropology” as it says on the back of the book. CitationJohn J. Honigmann (1976) and CitationFred W. Voget (1976) each published far longer, more comprehensive, and detailed histories a quarter century ago. These are not mentioned in Patterson's bibliography, nor is the pioneering short history by CitationRobert H. Lowie (1937).

10 Patterson (p. 61) inserts a long statement by Boas about race that—if it were only understood by today's enthusiasts for the wonders of the genome and its medical applications would save a great deal of misunderstanding. Here is a key passage: “The error of modern theories is due largely to a faulty extension of the concept of individual heredity to that of racial heredity. Heredity acts only in lines of direct descent” (CitationBoas, 1930, p. 91)—not in some imagined “geographical race.”

11 “The Cold War, precipitated by the United States and England and adopted by the other capitalist countries to halt the advance of socialism” (p. 103) is not an adequate introduction to such a complex topic. Like any war, this one had another side. It is also an affront to democratic socialists who also understood the threat to their values (and lives) from Stalin and the expanding totalitarian Soviet empire.

12 This is certainly the interpretation of one reviewer, CitationDavid A. Price (2002, p. 805).

13 Two of the few examples of putative collaboration that he cites—whether this is guilt or not depends on your perspective—are the cases of Clyde Kluckhohn, Margaret Mead, and their associates who participated in projects to study Russian and East European cultures and national character “at a distance.”

14 They might supplement Patterson's book with Regna Darnell's Invisible Genealogies (2001), another “disciplinary history” from a very different perspective. Darnell's heroes are the linguists, the humanists, and the translators of culture rather than the political, economic, and social comparativists and “social scientists” Patterson discusses. There is so little overlap that it is as if Darnell and Patterson are writing about two different worlds (CitationLewis, 2002, p. 576).